Datacentre Interconnect, the new superheroes of networking's latest 'caped crusade'

In a previous blog, I discussed the new superheroes of the networking world, SDN and NFV, and what they were already delivering to our customers. Lately, our superheroes have been busy underpinning our new Data Centre Interconnect (DCI) product and preparing themselves for the next phase within Telstra’s Programmable Network.

I will talk more in future blogs about Programmable Network, but put simply, it takes the best components from our Symphony and PEN initiatives and continues their development under a single global vision, architecture, and investment program.

Just prior to Christmas, our latest SDN launch was made and indeed it’s a great case study of how we are already orchestrating multiple network elements into an end to end product construct delivering exactly what the market is telling us is needed: more agile network products that can be consumed in a pay as you go fashion.

What I did learn recently from experts like Rik Harris in our product/platform team, however, was that in understanding how the orchestrator “made calls” for existing platform elements, we are indeed not only creating new products more quickly though programmability, but exposing capabilities to our customers in a completely new range of ways.

Jon Vestal is another expert internally who has been explaining to me the concept of platform “lego blocks” that we not only use in constructing products such as Data Centre Interconnect, but also expose via APIs that can be consumed directly typically by developers, IT Ops teams, and system integrators.

So, a diagram like this showing how Data Centre Interconnect is architecturally constructed …

… can also be broken down into a new way of offering capabilities where our customers can not only consume a solution, service, or product, they can consume the underlying platform elements:

If you are excited about the ability to consume platform functions and capabilities this way, get ready for the Programmable Network, where you too can be your own product manager, consuming platform capabilities the same way we did in putting together Data Centre Interconnect.

So back to byline, where do our superheroes SDN and NFV fit into all of this? With such a great outcome, who really cares?